Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Art for social change: Amplify it

The Amplifier Foundation calls itself an "art machine for social change." It was created to fund a collaboration between artists and communities to create expressions — and amplify them — of democratic desires, or our better angels, as Abraham Lincoln once said. You saw the posters by the Obama "Hope" artist Shepard Fairey everywhere during the women's marches that just took place around the globe; a Kickstarter campaign allowed the foundation to buy full-page ads of the We the People campaign posters in the New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today. The Amplifier Foundation reports the results:

Through YOUR participation in this campaign, and through YOUR vote of confidence in these new symbols of hope, we have begun to take back the narrative about who WE the PEOPLE really are.

Because of YOU, on January 20th, we launched full-page advertisements in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA today, spreading 2.2 million pieces of this art across every state in America. We also distributed over 30,000 placards of the art that you carried through the streets of Washington DC and Los Angeles. And in the places we couldn’t print in time, you found a way to print it yourselves. Through our website we offered free art that was downloaded over 500,000 times in just 3 days and then printed and carried into the streets or hung on doors and windows across the nation. We saw the message spread not just across this country but across the world, with it appearing somewhere in nearly every photo and video we saw of protests from every corner of the globe.

The art for this historic event, which brought millions of people to the streets to protest what is the threat to basic rights that the Trump administration presents, was downloaded in 203 countries, the foundation says. But the foundation is not through amplifying yet. Director Aaron Huey has issued a request for the following items:

We are looking for airplanes too wrap if you have one. Preferably commercial. Yes, you read that right, and I won’t rest until I have it.

We are looking for visible walls in high traffic areas in our biggest cities, for banners or murals.

We are looking for the owners of advertising space in rural areas and billboards on rural highways and interstates.

We are looking for advertising partners that are willing to give us a percentage of their corporate social responsibility budget for the year to make space available for this work.
We are looking for printers who will work with us at cost to print for schools that want this work.

If you can do these things please contact us at partners@theamplifierfoundation.org. If you aren’t these people and you cannot do these things, but you know people who can please connect us.

We want these images to be EVERYWHERE, to be a compass, reminding us of our strength when we come together, reminding us of our duty as we march on.

Now the marathon begins. We are ready again today to fight for this, and we will be ready the day after that, and the day after that too. We vow to use every platform we can find, make, or hack to continue this work you helped us start. So keep your heads up and your voices loud!

See you in the streets!

If you don't have a plane, or any of the other items on the wish list, at least go to the website.

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